Ep. 115: "Rerememory"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Oh, it's going really well.
It's pretty early.
It's pretty early.
I slept a very, very, very long time last night, and I feel like I could sleep another very long time.
I feel like the Merlin that used to sleep a long time was an earlier version of Merlin.
It was Merlin 1.0.
And lately, all I think of is Merlin just never getting enough sleep.
But you're telling me that Merlin 2.0 sometimes sleeps for 11 hours?
Well, Merlin 2014 has started to find a lot of value in sleep.
I will tell you that.
And this is super interesting, I'm sure, to people.
But I realized how many of my afflictions I could write down to the fact that I just wasn't sleeping very well.
So I try to make myself sleep well now.
And it has definitely helped my old man quotient in all the things where people wonder why I'm such a homebody and never go anywhere.
I'm like...
But I'd have to go to bed at 11 if I do that.
My dad, I mean, you know, my mom sort of famously only sleeps.
I guess she gets a full night's sleep, but she wakes up at four in the morning.
My dad would stay up all night and wake up in the morning just fine and, you know, like get by on four or five hours of sleep.
And I remember when I was young hearing that older people didn't need as much sleep.
Mm-hmm.
I do not know if I am finding that to be personally true.
That means you're still young.
Of myself.
No, that's exactly right.
I'm still young.
I still need 12 hours of sleep like a four-year-old.
I don't know.
One thing that obsesses me in all kinds of things is, like, I think that my amount of enjoyment of life in general and many things in specific, I have to admit, comes from something related to how much control I have over the environment, right?
Like I think one reason I didn't like jobs a lot in the past is because I didn't have that much control over the environment.
You had to be in with the overhead lights and people and stuff like that.
And I wonder if part of it is like when you have more control over your environment when you get older.
You know what I mean?
Like people kind of leave you alone.
You sit around.
You watch your stories.
You clean the cat box.
You go to sleep.
It damn well suits you.
And then you get up at 4 in the morning and put on a tie to go to the DMV even though you don't need to.
Yeah.
Yeah, and maybe all those old people need less sleep stories are failing to take into account the three and a half hour nap they take sitting up in their chair watching Walker, Texas Ranger.
That counts as downtime, I think.
Well, yeah.
I mean, it's, yes, I totally agree.
And, uh, but it's, it's weird.
Like, um, you know, old people also, they do stuff like they poop less and I think that frustrates them.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
Old people poop less.
I think they do.
I think.
What insight do you have into getting old that I don't have?
I've known three old people at least personally, you know, as well as you can know an old person, they become very opaque at a certain age.
Right.
I want to talk about memories.
Um, but they also talk to you about their poop.
Well, I, I, I will just say that for my grandmother's generation, I think I've said this before.
My grandmother, I think is somewhat emblematic of her generation.
She's a post Kellogg American and she really thought, and she would be so embarrassed.
My late grandmother would be so embarrassed.
I'm talking about her poop on the radio.
The more brand, the better.
Yeah.
But you know, I think you were expected to make every morning, you know, you didn't leave the house.
It would like, you know, be going out without your spats or something like that.
I've told you the story about the priest that cornered me in the fish bar in Sandpoint, Idaho.
Asked me how many BMs I had a day.
Is that his opening line?
Pretty much.
You know, that's how Predator works, John.
They learn what really works.
We were at the fish bar, which is a bar shaped like a fish.
You walk in the mouth of the giant fish.
I'm sure I've told you this story.
And we were drinking red beer, which is a North Idaho tradition.
Half beer, half tomato juice.
Oh, God.
And he leaned over.
I mean, we'd been chatting.
But he was like, you know, let me just break in.
Let me ask you, how many BMs do you have a day?
And I was like, boy, I don't know.
One?
Zero?
Sometimes none for a couple of days?
Sometimes a whole bunch all at once?
He was like, no, no, no, no, no.
That's not healthy.
You need to have two or three good BMs.
Solid, healthy BMs a day.
This man is sitting here.
He's sitting there.
He's drinking tomato juice and beer like an animal and telling you that you should have three good BMs a day?
That's what he said.
Is that possible?
Well, he was a priest.
He's got, like, special knowledge.
Yeah, he's not allowed to lie.
So, from that, and then, you know, he's having this conversation with me when I'm 19, I guess.
Yeah.
So, from that time to the present, I have always, in the back of my head, had a little sort of tally sheet, and I'm, if three BMs a day is the standard of good health, I'm, like, probably 8,200 BMs down.
Yeah.
Like I have so much catching up to do and I'm not looking forward to it.
You know, I'm not looking forward to getting that accounting square.
That sounds like bragging, John.
That sounds like bragging to me.
To me, the problem is if you're having three BMs a day, they aren't good BMs.
Something went wrong.
He's saying that you need to have good ones.
And I'm not sure whether you have to be eating in a cafeteria of a sort of a seminary to get the right balance of like jello salad and chicken cutlets or whatever it is that they're, you know, like green beans.
Let me ask you, John, how much heavenly hash do you eat?
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Sometimes I think back at the experiences I had as a young man and I marvel at them and say...
What the hell was happening?
And also, how do I remember?
I mean, there are people around me who can't remember what somebody said to them on the phone.
You're so good at this.
You're so good at that.
I do not know why these things stick in my head, but every one of them is a small component of the DNA of my mantra.
When I wake up in the morning, it's like, right, three BMs today.
You begin every day.
You're already in the hole every day.
3 p.m.
today.
And, you know, remember the Battle of Midway.
And also, Welsh Troll.
That time that I used that word wrong in 1981.
That guy with the tattoos on his hands that I insulted when I was working at Steve's Broadway News.
He's still mad at me, I'm sure.
You're like – you're like a mythical Greek beast.
It's kind of like – almost like a Cassandra thing.
You're condemned to never be able to forget.
Never forget.
That's right.
This is what scares me about my stupid kid is like I've gotten now so into the thing of going like my kid is just, I don't know if she's just not receiving information, if that information is being poorly encoded onto her hard drive.
But we have a big problem with things like socks and understanding the role of socks and being able to leave the house.
Get ready for this.
What is the role of socks?
You need them.
Yeah.
Because then you got to put shoes on before you leave.
And that's 25 minutes right there.
So I've gotten into this terrible habit of thinking that my daughter doesn't hear anything, and then she'll just blow my gourd off by remembering something deeply, deeply specific from when she was two or three.
So here's one thing about memory that I think is super interesting.
I know if you ask most people what their earliest memories are, they'll –
First of all, there's all this stuff that they know because their family told them that over and over.
But most people's memories, I think, start – their memories as adults start around age five.
So I just assume that something happens and they just hit reset.
But stuff I've read recently indicates that.
It actually – it just starts erasing a little bit around five or six.
By 10, you're really forgetting a lot of stuff.
That's what scares me.
I don't know what kind of bullshit I've said one time that she's going to use to guide her life regarding her BMs every morning.
And it's just some offhanded thing I said.
I mean, I still I remember like such specific things like you're saying, like talking to the priest over the tomato beer.
I have such specific recollections of these things.
I can't imagine how that's governing my day to day life.
And it terrifies me.
Well, I have to I have to think about that.
I think quite a bit because I am governed by these constant little like addenda to the constitution that I'm always adding.
And a lot of them are ancient and I have no idea whether three BMS a day is, is some kind of standard or whether this priest was crazy or whether this was some kind of like, come on or, or whether it was like an invitation to join, uh,
the Society of Jesus that I wasn't like, I was misinterpreting what he was saying.
Maybe BMs were like Bismillah.
Like a sacrament or something?
Like how many Bismillah do you say a day?
Bismillah!
Oh, I see.
I don't know what the fuck was.
Who knows?
But I talk to people like I have a couple of close friends who both kind of casually shrug off
The idea that they have a really bad memory.
Oh, I have a really bad memory.
Shrug.
And...
And normally, I feel like that is a... It's either a self-fulfilling prophecy or it's a cop-out, you know, like, oh, you have a bad memory, so... Yeah, it's like a get-out-of-jail-free card for existence.
But, you know, within the spectrum of human talents, it's obvious, right?
Having a bad memory is something that absolutely could be an affliction, and you wouldn't know...
you wouldn't even know you had it unless you were... I mean, the only way you would know is by comparing and contrasting your experience with other people, where they're like, you remember that time when we blankety-blank, and you're like, Jesus, I don't.
So I guess I must have a bad memory.
But that could be a descriptor for a whole lot of things that were going on.
You know, it's the old, like...
Is the orange that I see the same orange that you see?
We both call it orange, right?
But, like, how do you gauge, you know, how do you gauge perception except by...
By this, like, ungainly process of trying to describe your experience and seeing if it squares with other people.
Right.
So these friends that are like, yeah, I have a really bad memory.
And, you know, and I go, well, you have a bad memory for, like, stuff that's happened recently.
You also have a bad memory for stuff that happened to you a long time ago.
Or is it just that...
you're not turning experiences into metaphors.
You know, is it, is it memory or is it, is part of the process of, of remembering things like, like changing your, changing memories into, into metaphors or stories or,
Or changing them into other forms that are easier to hold on to and process.
A kind of unintentional heuristic where it's your brain's equivalent of writing it down in the big book.
Right.
Yeah, right.
Like 25 other things happened that night in the fish bar.
Right.
in Sandpoint, Idaho.
And honestly, I could not tell you who I was there with or why I was there or any of the other sort of lead up to why I was at the fish bar in Sandpoint, Idaho and where I was headed afterwards.
So this priest said this to me.
I found it remarkable.
I found it a remarkable conversation at the time.
And it's not like when he brought this up, I reeled back.
I was like, whoa, I've got to remember this.
But I was engaged in the conversation.
I was like, tell me more about how many poops I should be having.
I feel like a grown-up, and you are definitely a grown-up.
This is not a conversation I've had before with a fellow grown-up.
And so I'm really engaged.
But then I took away, and I was also drunk, but I took it away from there and put it in the big book of my memory because I converted it somehow into a story that...
That was a bigger story.
It was more meaningful.
And so, within the fog of this, like, I remember the fish bar.
I definitely know where that is.
I could probably find it, even.
Um, but I don't know who I was there with, but then out of the fog, I can picture this priest.
I know exactly what he looked like.
I know right where, right at the bar where we were standing.
And I remember the five minutes that we sat and talked about poop and
And so why did I convert that of all the things that happened that night?
You know, why was that a thing that turned into, in a way, like a marble?
Like, it became hard like a marble, right?
and went into my bag of marbles.
And you don't find yourself wondering or disputing that it didn't happen or it happened differently than you remember.
It's pretty well... It's saying Doctor Who.
It's a fixed point in time.
You know that this is the thing that happened.
This is your marble.
Well, yeah, because unlike childhood memories where...
You've looked through the photo album sitting on your mom's lap.
She's told you about the picture you're looking at.
That affects your memory of it.
And pretty soon you're like, I totally remember the time I stuck a knife into a light socket.
It's like, well, do you or have you looked at that photo album so many times?
But this memory of this priest, I had no second...
There was no other confirmation of it.
It's almost like you could see it like a movie, right?
You could see that scene playing.
Yeah, and the way I understand memory works is you recall that clip, you play it for yourself, you re-remember it, and then you store it away.
So with each re-remembering, I have surely altered it, but...
but I'm not, you know, I'm not, it's such a simple story, right?
I'm not saying like the priest rode in on a, on a, like a custom low rider bicycle and like, there's no, there's no detail to it.
It's just this moment.
And then, and within that, it's a very private recollection of me standing next to this guy.
And, and I think part of what, part of why it was so, so, um,
Why I took it away was that it was one of those early adult interactions where I'm 19.
The drinking age in Idaho at the time was still 19.
So I was legally in this bar and legally standing there with one foot on the brass rail drinking an abomination, really.
Half tomato juice, half beer.
Yeah.
Disgusting.
But it was the flavor of this area.
And the fish bar is back in the woods.
And that was during that era of white supremacy in northern Idaho.
So Hayden Lake and the white nationalists were very active in that area at the time.
And so there was all this adulthood stuff.
I was feeling in that moment like this is what adults do.
They go to bars and they drink like terrible potions.
And I'm talking to a priest, like a real priest.
He's not a junior priest.
He's not a minister.
He's a priest.
Like he's a priest who goes all the way back to St.
Peter.
And this is what he wants to talk about.
And so here, so I'm a man.
It passes the test of a grown up conversation.
Yeah, right.
Like, I guess this is, I mean, at the time I had no way of knowing, like, maybe this is what all my adult conversations are going to be like.
I'm going to be drinking beer mixed with something.
In a bar shaped like an animal.
We don't know the animal.
All we know is it'll be some kind of a spiritual clergy person.
We don't know what.
It could be a nun.
Right.
Could be in a pig bar somewhere.
Could be a rabbi.
A rabbi in a pig bar.
The great Morrissey song.
Rabbi in a big bar.
There's a sense that outside the doors of the bar, they're like very quickly, like right across the parking lot.
And it's a dirt parking lot, right?
So even the parking lot feels a little wild.
But right across the parking lot, you're in the wilderness of northern Idaho and you are surrounded by Klansmen or worse, skinheads.
And what do you talk about?
What is there to talk about?
Like if he had said, how many times do you come a day?
I would have been like, this is what we're talking about, I guess.
I'm new here.
Exactly, like 19 years old and ready to, you know, I could go to Vietnam right now if it was 20 years ago.
It's a lot easier now.
But instead, I'm learning about what it is to be a man here.
If you're going to learn how to be a man, it might as well be from a priest in a fish bar in Idaho.
So why the fuck wouldn't that turn into a marble and go in my bag?
Okay, so I'm going to throw this out.
I think this is another one of those.
I won't say it's an old person thing, but I'll say a funny thing about young people.
There's a thread here.
When you're young, you don't think about your poop.
When you're young, you don't think about your memories.
You don't have any reason to because everything is running as far as you know, running like a top.
So I mean even in like psychology classes, I would hear about things like how memories actually work, which seemed completely foreign because my memories were great.
I knew exactly what I was doing.
You'd hear about things like cognitive biases and go, oh, that's very interesting for people who aren't as smart as me.
And now like today, it's one thing to like realize you don't remember things.
You don't remember things.
It's another thing to remember you don't remember them as well as you thought.
But I'll tell you what fucks me up hard is when –
I think it's exactly what you're saying, which is that tape, that old VHS tape of that memory.
Every time you play it, it degrades a little bit.
Every time you tell that story, it gets further.
Even if it's not a tall tale, it might get exaggerated.
It might get slightly.
But each time, you're hearing that as well as saying it.
And that's, I think, hurting some of the fidelity of the original memory, if it was ever there at all.
But here's what gets me.
It's like when I find out I remember something wrong.
When I have something that I consider like a hard little marble, and then I've been telling this story for years, and then somebody goes, that's not how that went.
And I feel I'm so chastened.
I used to tell this – one of my go-to stories in interviews for a long time, we'd say like, how did you get into Macs?
And I'd say this same story over and over, which was that I had dated this wonderful woman when I started in my freshman year.
She had a Magnavox word processor.
I wrote all my papers on it.
And when she broke up with me, I had to learn to type on something else and I ended up going to the Mac lab.
And every little bit of that is true, I think, except for one important detail.
I went to lunch with her one day after she had heard this anecdote.
And she said, you know, you broke up with me.
Oh.
And all I needed to do was hear her say those words, and I went, oh my god, you're right.
I broke up with you.
That's a different story.
It's not crucial to the story, but how much else did I get wrong?
Oh my god, that's a real tentpole of the story.
What an asshole.
I had a wonderful girlfriend from New England with a Magnavox, and I broke up with her.
Oh, you jerk.
But I felt like such a dick.
And it's exactly the kind of... I'm just saying.
It's exactly the kind of thing now that makes me doubt myself.
Because I am one of those people who says I don't remember things.
I thought I remembered that.
But I wonder how much other stuff I just get dead wrong or remember the context wrong.
Or I didn't take a step back and think about all the facts and evidence.
Well, I feel like when I learn...
that a story that I've told a lot, uh, many times has a factual error.
It's usually exactly the thing that you're talking about, which is that I say, you know, the second time I went to see the grateful dead, I met up with my bro in his Volkswagen bug.
And we, uh,
Smoke popped the whole way over from Spokane and Santana was the opener and that was the night that I got thrown out of the Tacoma Dome because I had a bottle of peach schnapps and a guy found me and threw me out.
That's a good story.
It's an amazing story.
And you were like, it's just peach schnapps.
Give me a break.
You said to the guy, take away the schnapps, but let me stay, right?
I know the story.
It's a good story.
Yeah, except that the peach schnapps story was actually ZZ Top at the Tacoma Dome.
And everything else was true about the second time I saw the Grateful Dead.
And the conflation of the two things and what ends up being like
What ends up being just sort of the window dressing on the story, because I feel like the reason the peach schnapps story or the fish bar story, like the reason that that turns into a marble and you walk away with it is that I've been trying to fit that marble into the right slot.
For the intervening 25 years.
Right?
I pull that marble out sometimes and I go, is this where this story belongs?
Did I learn that because it applies here?
And I push it into a contemporary context.
Like, the peach snob story at ZZ Top fits here.
And I try it out.
Because I'm looking for a place where that is a metaphor for this.
I'm trying to interpret a new experience, and I know I've been carrying around this bag of marbles for a reason.
And I go, I reach in and I'm like, does this story finally make sense in the context of this new information?
And in most cases, you know, you try and fit it in there and you're like, huh, kind of.
But every once in a while, you get one of those where you just stick the thing in there and it just locks.
And you're like, holy shit, the story is completed.
There's not a lot of incentive for you to crack that marble in half and make sure it's what you thought it was.
Right.
So, so, but, but the, but the question of like, was it the, was it Grateful Dead or ZZ Top like that?
That stuff is the, is the shocker where it's like, I've been telling this story wrong the whole time.
Oh, it's awful.
But, but ultimately that doesn't matter unless you're trying to, I mean, that isn't the reason you, you made that into a story to carry with you.
Unless you're sitting around in a group of people and everybody's telling Grateful Dead stories, right?
And I think usually that's where it comes out.
You start to tell your Grateful Dead story and you're like, holy shit, wait a minute.
I like it better as a Grateful Dead story.
Yeah, it's better as a Grateful Dead story.
But the thing is, I don't think you'd get kicked out of a Grateful Dead concert for having peach schnapps.
I don't think you'd get kicked out for making peach schnapps.
Ha ha ha!
I feel like the security guards at the Tacoma Dome for a Grateful Dead and Santana show have bigger fish to fry.
Yeah.
Whereas at the ZZ Top show, for whatever reason, come on.
They're looking for southern comfort, and they found peach schnapps in this instance, and we're like, good enough.
You're out on the street.
Oh, so mad still.
That's a terrible feeling.
You know, I don't want to change the topic, but I heard a song.
And I really liked it.
Was it The Grange?
No, I heard a song and I felt this little twinge on the back of my neck.
And I thought, first of all, my immediate thought was this song is really, really good.
Had you heard it before or heard it for the first time?
I knew I thought I was pretty sure I'd heard it before, but I was fighting myself because there was a very strong feeling I was getting that it was almost certainly a Grateful Dead song.
And I started feeling really bad about it because my marble does not fit in that slot.
Uh-huh.
And I took out my phone and I hit the Shazam box of rain from American beauty.
See what a nice song.
Oh my, what a, what an excellent album.
I heard that.
And I was like, God damn it.
This fucks with my marble set because, you know, I was sitting there listening to that and thinking like, this could be something that REM put out in 1986.
Yeah.
or 85, 86.
It's really, really great, and it's not extraneous, and it's not full of bullshit I associate with The Grateful Dead.
It's very manicured and well-edited, and it made me angry.
But it's a really good song.
American beauty is full of really excellent songwriting.
And at that moment in history, like they were contemporaneous with the band and Crosby, Stills and Nash and all part of the same school as those guys.
And they were all like collaborating on records with one another.
I mean, they were, they were, they, that was a, that was their pop record.
And it, it's a fantastic album.
And he's a, he's a really good pedal steel player, right?
I mean, doesn't he play on like Teach Your Children Well and stuff like that?
Who, Jerry?
Yeah.
He plays the pedal steel?
That's what I'm thinking of, right?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure.
I'll check it out.
I didn't know.
Yeah, I think he's a pretty accomplished guy.
And there was some kind of thing with the recording of that album and maybe the one before it where something happened and he ended up having to play more pedal steel.
And I think he's pretty good at it.
Well, it wouldn't surprise me.
I mean, they're all really good.
They're all really, really good musicians.
Except maybe Bob Weir.
But no, I mean, the Grateful Dead hate...
Uh, it's understandable, you know, like there's a lot of out of tune singing and there's a lot of, I mean, there are a lot of those live recordings.
Um, they're so, they're so messed up on drugs that it, that it's just like, no, it's not good.
But, um,
For years, I have filed it.
I used to be kind of – because going to a hippie school, you end up hearing some Grateful Dead, but you hear about the Grateful Dead a lot, and it's another one of those things where you're like – it's like people who are into Tool.
You're just like, ugh.
I couldn't even name a Tool song, but the people who are really into Tool or the people who are – to quote Sloan, who you love – the people who are really into Consolidated, you're just like, ugh, God, you're so annoying.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think that's what it was.
And then as I grew as a person, John, I filed it more under my more grown-up thing from probably about maybe Merlin Revision 12 was like, this is just not for me.
And that was a perfectly fine marble in a very sensible grown-up slot.
But now, I don't know, I might have to go back.
I might have to go check my memories.
I feel like the key elements to be conscious of in The Grateful Dead are that they...
Really pioneered the loud, clean guitar tone.
Hmm.
Which, as Dave Bazan pointed out the other day, you hear again in The Cure...
The clean but loud guitar that's not trying to be... And in retrospect, unprocessed.
Mostly unprocessed.
If you listen to something like an Echo and the Bunnymen or something, there will be a lot of shaping of the sound.
But you're right, that's a really good point.
And he has a great guitar tone.
it's it's great and and he's you know he's using like the chorusing effects that we started to hear later on clean guitar you know jerry garcia was doing all this like in and out of phase stuff with his you know he had one of those guitars that had 11 different switches on it and it's all all the switches are like this pickup's in phase now and this pickup's out of phase and and it creates a kind of
chorusing or you know like filtering effect on the tone but really always very clean tone so there's that and then for me the other thing is phil lesh the bass player
never plays the same note twice.
His bass lines are these like weaving, bobbing up and down, um, like courses of notes that if you just kind of zoom in on them, they're miraculous.
Um, because they're there, you know, whatever Phil, however, Phil Lesh hears the patterns of music, um,
uh it's like it's a dimension closer to jazz or for you know further from the surface of the earth than than where i live and so the bass lines are like really all over the place and kind of extraordinary musical just musical pieces on their own and then you know of course every every once in a while they they would write a killer tune
All right.
Well, I'm going to give it another chance.
The bass thing is very appealing to me.
As somebody who, I guess, I have a feeling that a lot of bass players start as guitar players.
And you can kind of tell who those people are.
Don't you think?
You know what I'm saying?
Like somebody who takes the bass for what it needs to be.
I mean, like John Entwistle, he might have started on guitar.
Who knows?
But man, he plays that like nobody else.
He plays the bass in a way that only a bass could be played.
Whereas I'm more like Lou Barlow.
Like I'm out there going, you know, G-G-G-G-D-D-D-D-C-C-C-C-D-D-D-D.
Do you know what I mean by the difference?
Yeah.
Well, and the thing about Entwistle is he looks so calm and implacable
But in his bass playing, there's all this ferociousness and fury.
Just pure fury.
And Phil Lesch is, again, another step out...
onto the grass, um, where there's not a lot of fury in Phil Esch, but it's not, it's not just dumb, calm noodling either.
He is, you know, he is chasing a unicorn across a lake and, and,
And I don't know what it means half the time.
I really don't.
With Entwistle, I feel like I know what it means because it connects with me so deeply.
And if you zoom in, if you listen to The Who and you just zoom in on the bass, you will just have a tremendous experience that for me is very emotional and very like, ah, yes!
Yes!
And I think Phil Lesh, you know, what we think of as like the noodling of jam bands, the incomprehensible noodling of jam bands.
Yeah, a little, with a lot of the kind of jazz inflections, like if you don't get that stuff right, it's a pretty rough road.
But with Entwistle, even when he does something like, how can I express this?
Like a little pentatonic Phil, like a little do-ga-do-ga-do kind of like little thing.
Yeah.
It sounds like a building's falling down.
Like the simplest little like, this is the end of this part of the verse that he'll hit.
It's just like, oh man.
I'm really embarrassed to say this, but just three days ago, I was watching, or not watching, I'm sorry, I was listening to soloed Geddy Lee bass parts on YouTube.
You do not want to set me on the path of isolated tracks on YouTube.
Have you done it much?
I have done it.
I've done it quite a bit.
The problem is that when I start going down there, I'm just like, stop it.
Stop it.
Stop it.
Get out.
Get out.
You just listened to a three and a half long minute.
You just listened to YYZ still with the bass solo.
And then you listen to it again.
That's indefensible.
Yeah.
You are making a marble that you are not going to find a slot for.
You're not going to fit this in anywhere else.
Yeah.
This is not useful.
But it's thrilling, you know?
And the reason it got me there was I was listening to soloed helmet drum tracks.
That was my entry point.
Okay, I want to write that down.
That's good.
Did you go and see them recently?
I saw helmet within a couple of years, whatever their last, when they got back together.
And, you know, it was phenomenal.
But listening to the drum tracks of helmet soloed,
you know, like the first thing that you notice is, wow, that snare is really tuned up.
Like it is a tight snare and a ringing, a tight ringing snare.
But then you zoom... Because the thing is, for most of the tune, it's just kick and snare.
He's not...
It's like Nabil used to say when we would do soundcheck, and the guy would have him hit the tom 15 times during soundcheck, and then Nabil would say, well, that's four times more times than I hit the tom in my entire set.
I just hit it 15 times.
I hit it four times during our set.
But listening to the kick and snare of these helmet drum, you know, isolated tracks, the kick drum is just so dead on, so relentless and so like...
You don't think of that music as having any swing because it doesn't, but the pocket of it is just extraordinary.
So, fuck, I will listen to soloed musicians forever and a day, and it's just not...
Well, it's not healthy.
I really feel like I've reached some kind of a nadir of both music dorkiness and just really every kind of dorkiness.
When I'm sitting there and one of my go-tos is Dave Grohl on Queens of the Stone Age's No One Knows.
You know the song?
Oh, do I?
That's a hell of a record.
Those fills are from another planet.
But then, so you're sitting there, you turn it on, and there's a lot of quiet for a while, and then it's just... The vast part I remember are like four fills.
Because the thing is, there's no guitars, right?
So all you hear, there's four fills that I'm looking for, but to get there, I listen to like three minutes of...
Which is a really good dunk cha.
Well, yeah, it's basically my Sharona.
Ah.
Huh.
Oh, my God.
That guy's a monster.
It's depressing.
It's depressing.
But, you know, it's a nice way to spend an evening.
I mean, it's better than listening to Noam Chomsky lectures, I guess.
I don't know.
Oh, you said a mouthful.
Have you ever listened to Isolated Gnome Chomsky?
It's just isolated Gnome Chomsky mouth sounds and breath sounds?
We cut out all the words and just kept in the smacking noises.
That Queens of the Stone Age record, I have to say, is still a real...
it's still a real influence on me.
And I, and it, it, I can't square that with any of the music that I make.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, but the sound, the tone, the feel of it, the, the, the attitude of it,
And it doesn't fit.
Part of it is like, I'm always really into music.
I'm not always into, I find myself when I think about the music that I like, it's sometimes it's, it stands across two or three genres.
You could very easily put that into a couple of different genres, but it's still, it's, it really is its own thing.
And, but it's, it's, it's aggressive without being like angrily stupid.
There's something, there's always a little bit of restraint to it, but a menace.
Yeah.
That song, Go With The Flow, it had such an impact on me.
And, you know, Go With The Flow is obviously like surfer philosophy, right?
And they are famously a stoner band.
But there's also something ironic in the delivery of Go With The Flow, or with the background of the music, it feels like a pretty aggressive take on that Go With The Flow philosophy.
But in trying to take that song apart and see what it's made of,
I realized that like a lot of great songs, there's nothing to it.
It's two chords, basically.
The impact of the tune is 100% production and attitude.
There's nothing complicated about it.
It's just sound.
And I guess that's the thing as a songwriter that I've always...
I always aspired as a songwriter to write songs that were not dependent on sound, that the song itself was elegantly built.
That's a pretty classic, I don't want to say classical, but that's kind of the classic idea of a great song.
You could play it just on a piano.
You could play it on a guitar by yourself.
Right.
I mean, it doesn't need strings.
It's like bittersweet symphony.
I'm not sure how well that would come across on a ukulele.
Yeah, it wouldn't, right?
But Solitary Man can be covered by 700 different artists and the greatness of the song shines through.
I don't think another band could cover Go With The Flow and make any dent in it or any improvement.
It's always just going to be... The album version is always going to be the best because it's like a sound creation.
And in a way that's different from like The Cure, which all those records are sonic creations.
Yeah.
But like you could cover a Cure song and do a cool interpretation of it and make it into something different.
But you couldn't cover a My Bloody Valentine song.
Exactly.
Exactly what I was just thinking.
Where Queens of the Stone Age, how they manage to be in that My Bloody Valentine category, although the songs have hooks and they're pop, but it's really like, it's a cake of sound.
And you take any one element and try and zoom in on it and say like, this is the guitar part.
And it's like, it's two chords.
It's just two chords through a distortion box.
It's nothing.
It's nothing.
So that, so as I, as I evolve, as I progress, like my interest in the last five years has been about trying to make these sonic tapestries, but I don't, but that isn't my tradition and that's not what I know best.
So in a way, that's why I'm so, why I have been so unproductive.
Like I want to make a record that sounds like loveless and have for years.
So did he.
Yeah, right.
Isn't that the story, though?
How he nearly bankrupted Creation Records with the creation of that record?
That's supposedly the story, anyway.
Yeah, and in a way, I feel like the recording of it actually was... The actual stuff that happened in the recording was pretty simple.
It's just like, loud guitar, mic in front of the amp.
But when I hear stories about how Loveless was recorded, where he created a tent out of blankets and would poke his head out and say to the engineer, just keep recording.
Don't ever talk to me through the talkback mic.
And then he would go under the blanket or whatever and be under there for four hours.
And the engineer is just like – and half of that time, it's just the sound of him chewing gum.
Wouldn't it be great – I don't remember the guy's name.
Wouldn't it be great to be the incredibly stressed out label owner and you got to just kind of stick your head in to just see how things are going?
There's a blanket.
And the engineer goes, he's been doing that for 90 minutes.
Sorry, man.
He's just under there.
And I feel like the lyric... My understanding of the recording of Loveless was that the vocals...
were recorded maybe extemporaneously a lot of the time, and they just would go under the blanket and make mouth sounds and keep the tape rolling.
And they made mouth sounds until those mouth sounds turned into word sounds.
And then they did it until they had a take.
Hmm.
And it's not like, I don't know, I've never seen a lyric.
That's how I do all my Cocteau Twins parodies.
I feel like, you know, I actually have a fourth long Winner's record that has vocals on 13 songs.
that are all mouth sounds.
Oh, you had a guest in?
You should have Elizabeth Frazier come in.
Hot to June on the sweater, ice cream sundae.
What I'm afraid of is that I'm going to die in a plane crash, and somebody's going to be like, let's go on his computer and find all the unreleased long-winded music.
I know, like Nabokov's son, like the estate decides to cash in, and just takes all the stuff and goes, oh, it looks like John was almost done with this.
I'll never know.
Chong-Tang, Chong-Tang.
Or even worse, hand those things off to my friends.
Like, hey, would you guys like to finish this song that John was working on?
Oh, okay.
Mike Squire's Revenge.
Exactly.
Hand it off to a cross-section of the American rock scene.
Oh my god, what a nightmare, John.
What if they got all of the disgruntled ex-Longwinners people together to record that?
Or every singer in the country that has some vague grudge that was never fully articulated.
That's going to take some work.
That's going to be a Microsoft Excel time.
Let's solo the vocals on this track and see what he was really going for.
You know what?
I'm not going to add anything to that vocal track.
I think it's perfect as it is.
I saw Colin Malloy in a Bob Mould video.
Can you believe that?
Well, yeah.
That video was directed by Alicia Rose, who is... That's a pretty funny video.
...friend, and she was the original...
uh, sort of stylist and photographer of the Decembrists.
Oh, interesting.
All those photographs that you see of them, you know, like holding red flags on top of a castle mount.
Looking like diluted miners on a break.
Yeah.
A big part of that, a big part of that look that defined them early on was that all their pictures were taken by Alicia.
Um,
So she's a Portland, she's a Portland Ridge.
Yeah.
And apparently she has like naked hot tub parties too.
Is that right?
I keep getting invited down to like, Hey, if you need a place to crash, I'm like, I don't know.
It'd be terrible for you to misunderstand that invitation.
And again, this could be a memory thing where maybe you heard that wrong, forgive my saying, but what if you got that a little bit wrong and just showed up with the wrong stuff?
Well, back in the old days, I was looking through some photographs the other day, and I found all these pictures of me in the very early 90s when I was in my modern primitive culture.
Yeah.
I was still pretty much like I am now, but for whatever reason, I have found myself in a modern primitive circle for a large portion of my social calendar.
And that involved a lot of mud and nakedness and industrial music and
The early days of tattoos in places other than on your forearms and of graphic elements other than anchors.
And I was always a little bit outside because I'm always a little bit outside of every culture I participate in.
But this group of people really did embrace me, and I embraced them for a period of a few years.
We were all very close and covered with mud.
And part of that was that you could not put intoxicating substances in us fast enough.
But I have a couple of photographs of me like...
sitting next to a fire pit with a with a like a dreadlocked girl sitting in my lap and like a bald guy with a long goatee and like pan boots uh playing a playing a flute and dancing around a goat carcass and
A pierced goat.
I'm just like, what the fuck was I up to?
That was a long time ago.
And I guess at the time I was trying to figure out what was next in the world.
That seemed...
That was the logical extension of what hippie values would lead to, I guess.
Right?
I mean, that seemed like next gen.
It wasn't friendly anymore.
It was trending dark again.
Mm-hmm.
And I felt like I needed to be there, boots on the ground, figure out what this was all about.
Pan boots?
Yeah, well, you remember logger boots?
I think back now, and I'm like, you know what?
Logger boots are really expensive.
Mm-hmm.
I didn't have logger boots at the time.
I just had some old boots.
But, like, there were a lot of people in logger, like, really nice logger boots.
Those are the ones that are real high up, lots of laces.
Yeah, right, with all the extra, or, like, pole climbers.
Mm-hmm.
I didn't have any money then, so I didn't even go to the store to look at how much those things cost.
I remember Doc Martens seeming out of my range.
That's how old I am.
They were.
They were $100.
Right.
And, I mean, back then you could get a pair of Chuck Taylors for $15.
Mm-hmm.
So I remember kind of waltzing around through that culture and definitely feeling like everybody's got amazing boots.
Yeah.
And I think the boots that I had, they passed muster because they were just thrashed.
They were just old, but they weren't tall.
And I think now and I'm like, even then those boots were probably $200.
$200 at a time when I was making $200 a month.
Is this the minivan days?
Well, no, I was making $0.0 a month then.
But even when I had a job, right?
Oh, the worst thing.
I was going through a box of papers not very long ago and I found an uncashed paycheck.
Oh, no.
From 1994 for like a hundred.
You were drunk.
$150.
That was so much money.
It was incredible.
$150.
Jesus.
You think he did it for a reason?
It was just oversight?
I have no fucking idea how, well, this is the thing.
How would that have ended up in a, I mean, I definitely have a lot of boxes of papers.
I have a stack inside the front door.
I have a stack of cigar boxes that now are... It's probably a five-foot-tall stack of cigar boxes.
And there's a cigar box for airplane tickets.
There's a cigar box for concert tickets.
There's a cigar box for unused drink tickets because everywhere I go, I get paid in drink tickets and I don't drink.
You're just lucky to be able to play your music.
Rather than hand those out to people and say like, hey, everybody, I got 10 drink tickets.
Why don't you go get yourself an extra drink?
Instead, I greedily keep them and I go home and I put, you know, I probably have $50,000.
How else could you mentally calculate what you weren't actually paid?
Yeah.
I have a separate cigar box for, like, sports game tickets.
A cigar box for old IDs.
A cigar box for other people's IDs that I find.
You know, like...
Looking up and down the stack of cigar boxes, there are a lot of different... Oh, well, I had two cigar boxes.
I have a cigar box for backstage passes that are stickers, and then a separate cigar box for backstage passes that are laminates.
I didn't know you smoked that much.
No, you just got another one that's just for cigar boxes.
Also, yeah, I collect cigar boxes.
So I'm always out looking for cigar boxes.
Somehow, in one of these cigar boxes, I have an uncashed pay stub from 1994, and I'm like, I knew enough somehow to put this in a box, but not enough to cash it?
I can't imagine...
It's one of those butterfly in China situations.
If I had cashed that $150... You know what the interest on that would be?
Well, I don't think I can cash it.
I think it's compound interest, John.
It's a thing.
But what I'm saying is if I had cashed it then, if I had had an extra $150 that month...
in 1994, would I be where I am today?
Oh, you might be way down in the hole.
Right?
Or would the decisions I made, based on having that extra $150, set me on a... You probably would not have put it into a retirement fund.
No, but I might have bought...
Who knows?
I might have bought an ice cream cake.
I might have... A single lager boot?
I might have bought... Yeah, put a down payment on a pair of lager boots.
I mean, you know, I got fired one time and I was sitting in a cafe the next day like kind of bemoaning having been fired and my good friend Chris Cornelia, whom you know, came in and sat down.
He was like, you know, so he got fired and I was like, yep.
And he said, how much money do you have in the bank?
And I said, well, I have actually been saving for the last year.
I got 800 bucks in the bank.
And he was like, what are you going to do with the 800 bucks?
And I said, I don't know, probably drink for a couple of months.
And he was like, you're going to take that 800 bucks and you're just going to sit around and not work and just drink?
And I was like, can you think of something better?
Like, yes, I'm really looking forward to this summer.
It really opens up your schedule.
And he said, let's go right now and buy you a guitar.
And I was like, what?
He was like, for 800 bucks, you can get a killer guitar.
And you are always talking about wanting to play music.
You're always talking about wanting to start a band.
You don't even have a fucking electric guitar.
I was like, well, yeah, you're right.
He was like, let's go.
Let's get on the bus, go to the guitar store, buy a guitar.
And it was such a revolutionary idea.
I was like, okay.
Okay.
And we walked out of the cafe, got on the bus, went to the guitar store.
And I had never had this.
I had never perceived myself as having this opportunity before.
And I went down to the trading musician in the university district and I walked in and that blonde Rickenbacker was sitting on a stand inside the door and I was like, well, I can't afford a Rickenbacker.
And the price tag said it was from 1967 and it was $650.
Wow.
And it had Gibson pickups in it.
And I was like, look at that.
And I picked it up and I played it.
And Chris was like... Like PAFs?
They weren't PAS, but they were like 60s, like, you know, late 60s Gibson.
Wow.
Pickups.
That somebody had taken out the filter trons that came with Rickenbackers and put these Gibson, you know, like 60s Gibsons in there.
God, that must have seemed like so much money.
It was extraordinary.
It was almost my entire savings.
And I was like, look at this thing.
And he was like, you can buy it right now.
And I put it down, and I walked around the store, and I spent a couple hours looking at every other guitar, and I kept coming back to this Rickenbacker.
And he was like... And Chris was standing there just like, that's the one you want.
Buy it.
This is what people do with money.
They buy the thing that they want with it.
And I was like, but, but, but, but, but, it's so much money, and this money, I could live on this money.
I could drink a thousand Pabst Blue Ribbons with this money.
And he was like, or you could buy this guitar.
And I...
I bought it.
I took it up to the counter and I said, I will buy this guitar.
And it was the first real, I think in a way, the first real thing I ever bought.
Wow.
And that guitar was the guitar that I started the Bunn family players with and the guitar that I started the Western state hurricanes with and the guitar I started the long winters with.
And you remember that, Rickenbacker?
Of course I do.
Have you still got it?
Still have it.
And so that was like... I know all that because of Chris Cornelia.
Who would have thought?
It was Chris Cornelia saying like, do you know what money does?
Are you aware of what other people do with money?
Like, do you know how money works in the world?
And I was like, I know how money works.
You put it in a shoebox or a cigar box and you stack it until you have a lot of it and then you look at it.
And then you drink your way through it.
And he said, you know, I mean, the reason it's hard for other people to save money is that they buy the things that they want, which obviously, like, you don't have that problem.
But every once in a while, you actually should buy a thing that you want.
And, you know, this guitar was like the, it was the thing that made it all possible.
It's insane.
Yeah.
67 Rickenbacker with Gibson pickups.
Are you pretty sure you remember most of that correctly?
Yeah.
What we should do is get Chris Canelia on here.
See if he validates that story.
I think Chris would pretty shortly try and steer the story toward the time that I broke into his apartment and put a knife in his chest and told him I was going to fuck him.
He's like that.